AN: This was originally posted on my AO3 account, and does not allow the same formatting, so it doesn't have quite the same effect as the original version. (Read: rather cranky author because restricting formatting is bullshit and sometimes you need to use a strikethrough and multiple question marks for emphasis, okay?) Please, however, enjoy this slightly differently-formatted version.
––Private Journal––
––Cinch's Journal––
––Journal of CT-4738––
––Journal of "Cinch", CT-4738––
Personal Journal of Trooper CT-4738
"Cinch"
––Location: Coruscant––
––Current Location: Coruscant––
––Coruscant - Residential District––
––Coruscant - Apartment––
Coruscant - ––home?––
Personal Journal of Trooper CT-4738
"Cinch"
Coruscant - Home
23:17 hours
I read somewhere that writing down your thoughts can be helpful. I couldn't find any regulation that said I wasn't allowed to, so I thought I'd try it. I don't really know what I'll write about. Maybe it will just help to get things down concretely, and out of my head. I've been told I have too much going on in my head.
(I've been told a lot of things about my head.)
We just got back from helping some of General Mundi's guys, and it was bad. The Seps had a platoon of them pinned down in the valley, and were picking them off from this control tower. We came in where we thought the Seps hadn't spotted us and set up position. But the Seps had these new electromag charges, which they deployed to weaken the platoon, and they disabled our gear too. I was able to work with that all right after some time, but they fried Peale's implants too, so he couldn't hear us anymore. And Nimbus' hand. Once I got the HUDs up and working again, our strategic position had lost its effectiveness, so we had to scrap the plan and come up with something on the fly. I have to hand it to Peale; he's good under pressure. (So much better than me.) But even he can only do so much when he can't see our mouths to lipread and is trying to split his attention between the speech-to-text scrawling across his HUD and our hand signals and what's going on around us. And yet somehow we managed to knock out the control tower and get our brothers out of there.
I guess maybe I'm supposed to write how I feel about it. I feel good. I guess. We saved some people again. There's nothing like knowing your brothers are going to come home safely. Er, back safely. We don't really have homes.
They don't really have homes. I'm different. I'm different now. I belong somewhere now. At least, as long as I keep doing my duty. The other guys are good to me though. They don't get on me about my face. They haven't kicked me out yet, anyway. Mousetrap is a good kid, even if he doesn't shut up. (I'll never say this to him, but I like that he talks to me. It's nice to be included.)
But I have a home, now, and a lot of other troopers don't. And I don't know how I feel about that. As much as I care about my squad, sometimes I wish I could go back. I'm a trooper; I should be on the front lines with everybody else. But I don't fit in there anymore. And I don't fit in with civilian life either. So I don't really deserve to have a home, because that's a civilian thing. But I read somewhere that there's a difference between deserving something and having something. People don't always deserve what the have. People don't always have what they deserve. The more time I spend on Coruscant, the more I realize that life in the rest of the galaxy isn't as black and white as it was in my training. There's a lot more than just, "There's the enemy; point and shoot." I don't know if I'll ever understand all the layers. But I guess that's part of it: seeing the layers in the first place.
I don't really know where I'm going with this. I suppose I'll stop now. I can always write more again, if I feel like it.